OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Reddit-Impacts: A Named Entity Recognition Dataset for Analyzing Clinical and Social Effects of Substance Use Derived from Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are a growing concern globally, necessitating enhanced understanding of the problem and its trends through data-driven research. Social media are unique and important sources of information about SUDs, particularly since the data in such sources are often generated by people with lived experiences. In this paper, we introduce Reddit-Impacts, a challenging Named Entity Recognition (NER) dataset curated from subreddits dedicated to discussions on prescription and illicit opioids, as well as medications for opioid use disorder. The dataset specifically concentrates on the lesser-studied, yet critically important, aspects of substance use--its clinical and social impacts. We collected data from chosen subreddits using the publicly available Application Programming Interface for Reddit. We manually annotated text spans representing clinical and social impacts reported by people who also reported personal nonmedical use of substances including but not limited to opioids, stimulants and benzodiazepines. Our objective is to create a resource that can enable the development of systems that can automatically detect clinical and social impacts of substance use from text-based social media data. The successful development of such systems may enable us to better understand how nonmedical use of substances affects individual health and societal dynamics, aiding the development of effective public health strategies. In addition to creating the annotated data set, we applied several machine learning models to establish baseline performances. Specifically, we experimented with transformer models like BERT, and RoBERTa, one few-shot learning model DANN by leveraging the full training dataset, and GPT-3.5 by using one-shot learning, for automatic NER of clinical and social impacts. The dataset has been made available through the 2024 SMM4H shared tasks.
Sensing-Assisted Adaptive Channel Contention for Mobile Delay-Sensitive Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper proposes an adaptive channel contention mechanism to optimize the queuing performance of a distributed millimeter wave (mmWave) uplink system with the capability of environment and mobility sensing. The mobile agents determine their back-off timer parameters according to their local knowledge of the uplink queue lengths, channel quality, and future channel statistics, where the channel prediction relies on the environment and mobility sensing. The optimization of queuing performance with this adaptive channel contention mechanism is formulated as a decentralized multi-agent Markov decision process (MDP). Although the channel contention actions are determined locally at the mobile agents, the optimization of local channel contention policies of all mobile agents is conducted in a centralized manner according to the system statistics before the scheduling. In the solution, the local policies are approximated by analytical models, and the optimization of their parameters becomes a stochastic optimization problem along an adaptive Markov chain. An unbiased gradient estimation is proposed so that the local policies can be optimized efficiently via the stochastic gradient descent method. It is demonstrated by simulation that the proposed gradient estimation is significantly more efficient in optimization than the existing methods, e.g., simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA).
Automating TODO-missed Methods Detection and Patching
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

TODO comments are widely used by developers to remind themselves or others about incomplete tasks. In other words, TODO comments are usually associated with temporary or suboptimal solutions. In practice, all the equivalent suboptimal implementations should be updated (e.g., adding TODOs) simultaneously. However, due to various reasons (e.g., time constraints or carelessness), developers may forget or even are unaware of adding TODO comments to all necessary places, which results in the TODO-missed methods. These "hidden" suboptimal implementations in TODO-missed methods may hurt the software quality and maintainability in the long-term. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the novel task of TODO-missed methods detection and patching, and develop a novel model, namely TDPatcher (TODO-comment Patcher), to automatically patch TODO comments to the TODO-missed methods in software projects. Our model has two main stages: offline learning and online inference. During the offline learning stage, TDPatcher employs GraphCodeBERT and contrastive learning for encoding the TODO comment (natural language) and its suboptimal implementation (code fragment) into vector representations. For the online inference stage, we can identify the TODO-missed methods and further determine their patching position by leveraging the offline trained model. We built our dataset by collecting TODO-introduced methods from the top-10,000 Python GitHub repositories and evaluated TDPatcher on them. Extensive experimental results show the promising performance of our model over a set of benchmarks. We further conduct an in-the-wild evaluation which successfully detects 26 \textit{\major{TODO-missed} methods} from 50 GitHub repositories.
Estimating Speech Duration by Measuring the Abdominal Movement Using a Barometric Sensor
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Measuring the amount of speech production in daily life is important for understanding communication in organizations and identifying mental disorders. However, measuring the amount of speech production can be problematic in terms of privacy. We observed the whole body condition during speech and noted that the abdomen strains during speech production.Therefore, we developed a less uncomfortable, inflatable abdominal motion measurement device using a barometric sensor to measure speech production indirectly. We measured speech production in 10 subjects and created a speech discrimination model using machine learning. However, the estimated speech duration in an actual meeting using this model was much longer than the actual duration. We found that the wearer's posture significantly affects the accuracy of the speech discrimination model developed in this study. We plan to improve the abdominal motion measurement device to minimize the effect of posture and achieve more accurate speech production measurement.
Pruning as a Domain-specific LLM Extractor
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across a wide array of NLP tasks. However, the escalation in model size also engenders substantial deployment costs. While few efforts have explored model pruning techniques to reduce the size of LLMs, they mainly center on general or task-specific weights. This leads to suboptimal performance due to lacking specificity on the target domain or generality on different tasks when applied to domain-specific challenges. This work introduces an innovative unstructured dual-pruning methodology, D-Pruner, for domain-specific compression on LLM. It extracts a compressed, domain-specific, and task-agnostic LLM by identifying LLM weights that are pivotal for general capabilities, like linguistic capability and multi-task solving, and domain-specific knowledge. More specifically, we first assess general weight importance by quantifying the error incurred upon their removal with the help of an open-domain calibration dataset. Then, we utilize this general weight importance to refine the training loss, so that it preserves generality when fitting into a specific domain. Moreover, by efficiently approximating weight importance with the refined training loss on a domain-specific calibration dataset, we obtain a pruned model emphasizing generality and specificity. Our comprehensive experiments across various tasks in healthcare and legal domains show the effectiveness of D-Pruner in domain-specific compression. Our code is available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/D-Pruner.
Exploring the Interplay of Interpretability and Robustness in Deep Neural Networks: A Saliency-guided Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Adversarial attacks pose a significant challenge to deploying deep learning models in safety-critical applications. Maintaining model robustness while ensuring interpretability is vital for fostering trust and comprehension in these models. This study investigates the impact of Saliency-guided Training (SGT) on model robustness, a technique aimed at improving the clarity of saliency maps to deepen understanding of the model's decision-making process. Experiments were conducted on standard benchmark datasets using various deep learning architectures trained with and without SGT. Findings demonstrate that SGT enhances both model robustness and interpretability. Additionally, we propose a novel approach combining SGT with standard adversarial training to achieve even greater robustness while preserving saliency map quality. Our strategy is grounded in the assumption that preserving salient features crucial for correctly classifying adversarial examples enhances model robustness, while masking non-relevant features improves interpretability. Our technique yields significant gains, achieving a 35\% and 20\% improvement in robustness against PGD attack with noise magnitudes of $0.2$ and $0.02$ for the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively, while producing high-quality saliency maps.
A Joint Approach Towards Data-Driven Virtual Testing for Automated Driving: The AVEAS Project
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

With growing complexity and responsibility of automated driving functions in road traffic and growing scope of their operational design domains, there is increasing demand for covering significant parts of development, validation, and verification via virtual environments and simulation models. If, however, simulations are meant not only to augment real-world experiments, but to replace them, quantitative approaches are required that measure to what degree and under which preconditions simulation models adequately represent reality, and thus allow their usage for virtual testing of driving functions. Especially in research and development areas related to the safety impacts of the "open world", there is a significant shortage of real-world data to parametrize and/or validate simulations - especially with respect to the behavior of human traffic participants, whom automated vehicles will meet in mixed traffic. This paper presents the intermediate results of the German AVEAS research project (www.aveas.org) which aims at developing methods and metrics for the harmonized, systematic, and scalable acquisition of real-world data for virtual verification and validation of advanced driver assistance systems and automated driving, and establishing an online database following the FAIR principles.
On general self-orthogonal matrix-product codes associated with Toeplitz matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we present four constructions of {general} self-orthogonal matrix-product codes associated with Toeplitz matrices. The first one relies on the {dual} of a known {general} dual-containing matrix-product code; the second one is founded on {a specific family of} matrices, where we provide an efficient algorithm for generating them {on the basis of Toeplitz matrices} and {it has an interesting application in producing new non-singular by columns quasi-unitary matrices}; and the last two ones are based on the utilization of certain special Toeplitz matrices. Concrete examples and detailed comparisons are provided. As a byproduct, we also find an application of Toeplitz matrices, which is closely related to the constructions of quantum codes.
Aspect-oriented Consumer Health Answer Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Community Question-Answering (CQA) forums have revolutionized how people seek information, especially those related to their healthcare needs, placing their trust in the collective wisdom of the public. However, there can be several answers in response to a single query, which makes it hard to grasp the key information related to the specific health concern. Typically, CQA forums feature a single top-voted answer as a representative summary for each query. However, a single answer overlooks the alternative solutions and other information frequently offered in other responses. Our research focuses on aspect-based summarization of health answers to address this limitation. Summarization of responses under different aspects such as suggestions, information, personal experiences, and questions can enhance the usability of the platforms. We formalize a multi-stage annotation guideline and contribute a unique dataset comprising aspect-based human-written health answer summaries. We build an automated multi-faceted answer summarization pipeline with this dataset based on task-specific fine-tuning of several state-of-the-art models. The pipeline leverages question similarity to retrieve relevant answer sentences, subsequently classifying them into the appropriate aspect type. Following this, we employ several recent abstractive summarization models to generate aspect-based summaries. Finally, we present a comprehensive human analysis and find that our summaries rank high in capturing relevant content and a wide range of solutions.
Fast Evaluation of DNN for Past Dataset in Incremental Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

During the operation of a system including a deep neural network (DNN), new input values that were not included in the training dataset are given to the DNN. In such a case, the DNN may be incrementally trained with the new input values; however, that training may reduce the accuracy of the DNN in regard to the dataset that was previously obtained and used for the past training. It is necessary to evaluate the effect of the additional training on the accuracy for the past dataset. However, evaluation by testing all the input values included in the past dataset takes time. Therefore, we propose a new method to quickly evaluate the effect on the accuracy for the past dataset. In the proposed method, the gradient of the parameter values (such as weight and bias) for the past dataset is extracted by running the DNN before the training. Then, after the training, its effect on the accuracy with respect to the past dataset is calculated from the gradient and update differences of the parameter values. To show the usefulness of the proposed method, we present experimental results with several datasets. The results show that the proposed method can estimate the accuracy change by additional training in a constant time.
PUMA: margin-based data pruning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep learning has been able to outperform humans in terms of classification accuracy in many tasks. However, to achieve robustness to adversarial perturbations, the best methodologies require to perform adversarial training on a much larger training set that has been typically augmented using generative models (e.g., diffusion models). Our main objective in this work, is to reduce these data requirements while achieving the same or better accuracy-robustness trade-offs. We focus on data pruning, where some training samples are removed based on the distance to the model classification boundary (i.e., margin). We find that the existing approaches that prune samples with low margin fails to increase robustness when we add a lot of synthetic data, and explain this situation with a perceptron learning task. Moreover, we find that pruning high margin samples for better accuracy increases the harmful impact of mislabeled perturbed data in adversarial training, hurting both robustness and accuracy. We thus propose PUMA, a new data pruning strategy that computes the margin using DeepFool, and prunes the training samples of highest margin without hurting performance by jointly adjusting the training attack norm on the samples of lowest margin. We show that PUMA can be used on top of the current state-of-the-art methodology in robustness, and it is able to significantly improve the model performance unlike the existing data pruning strategies. Not only PUMA achieves similar robustness with less data, but it also significantly increases the model accuracy, improving the performance trade-off.
A NLP Approach to "Review Bombing" in Metacritic PC Videogames User Ratings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Many videogames suffer "review bombing" -a large volume of unusually low scores that in many cases do not reflect the real quality of the product- when rated by users. By taking Metacritic's 50,000+ user score aggregations for PC games in English language, we use a Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach to try to understand the main words and concepts appearing in such cases, reaching a 0.88 accuracy on a validation set when distinguishing between just bad ratings and review bombings. By uncovering and analyzing the patterns driving this phenomenon, these results could be used to further mitigate these situations.
Decoding Emotions in Abstract Art: Cognitive Plausibility of CLIP in Recognizing Color-Emotion Associations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This study investigates the cognitive plausibility of a pretrained multimodal model, CLIP, in recognizing emotions evoked by abstract visual art. We employ a dataset comprising images with associated emotion labels and textual rationales of these labels provided by human annotators. We perform linguistic analyses of rationales, zero-shot emotion classification of images and rationales, apply similarity-based prediction of emotion, and investigate color-emotion associations. The relatively low, yet above baseline, accuracy in recognizing emotion for abstract images and rationales suggests that CLIP decodes emotional complexities in a manner not well aligned with human cognitive processes. Furthermore, we explore color-emotion interactions in images and rationales. Expected color-emotion associations, such as red relating to anger, are identified in images and texts annotated with emotion labels by both humans and CLIP, with the latter showing even stronger interactions. Our results highlight the disparity between human processing and machine processing when connecting image features and emotions.
Certified $\ell_2$ Attribution Robustness via Uniformly Smoothed Attributions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Model attribution is a popular tool to explain the rationales behind model predictions. However, recent work suggests that the attributions are vulnerable to minute perturbations, which can be added to input samples to fool the attributions while maintaining the prediction outputs. Although empirical studies have shown positive performance via adversarial training, an effective certified defense method is eminently needed to understand the robustness of attributions. In this work, we propose to use uniform smoothing technique that augments the vanilla attributions by noises uniformly sampled from a certain space. It is proved that, for all perturbations within the attack region, the cosine similarity between uniformly smoothed attribution of perturbed sample and the unperturbed sample is guaranteed to be lower bounded. We also derive alternative formulations of the certification that is equivalent to the original one and provides the maximum size of perturbation or the minimum smoothing radius such that the attribution can not be perturbed. We evaluate the proposed method on three datasets and show that the proposed method can effectively protect the attributions from attacks, regardless of the architecture of networks, training schemes and the size of the datasets.
Projection by Convolution: Optimal Sample Complexity for Reinforcement Learning in Continuous-Space MDPs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We consider the problem of learning an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in a general class of continuous-space Markov decision processes (MDPs) having smooth Bellman operators. Given access to a generative model, we achieve rate-optimal sample complexity by performing a simple, \emph{perturbed} version of least-squares value iteration with orthogonal trigonometric polynomials as features. Key to our solution is a novel projection technique based on ideas from harmonic analysis. Our~$\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(ε^{-2-d/(ν+1)})$ sample complexity, where $d$ is the dimension of the state-action space and $ν$ the order of smoothness, recovers the state-of-the-art result of discretization approaches for the special case of Lipschitz MDPs $(ν=0)$. At the same time, for $ν\to\infty$, it recovers and greatly generalizes the $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-2})$ rate of low-rank MDPs, which are more amenable to regression approaches. In this sense, our result bridges the gap between two popular but conflicting perspectives on continuous-space MDPs.
LLM Discussion: Enhancing the Creativity of Large Language Models via Discussion Framework and Role-Play
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional proficiency in natural language processing but often fall short of generating creative and original responses to open-ended questions. To enhance LLM creativity, our key insight is to emulate the human process of inducing collective creativity through engaging discussions with participants from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. To this end, we propose LLM Discussion, a three-phase discussion framework that facilitates vigorous and diverging idea exchanges and ensures convergence to creative answers. Moreover, we adopt a role-playing technique by assigning distinct roles to LLMs to combat the homogeneity of LLMs. We evaluate the efficacy of the proposed framework with the Alternative Uses Test, Similarities Test, Instances Test, and Scientific Creativity Test through both LLM evaluation and human study. The results show that our proposed framework outperforms single-LLM approaches and existing multi-LLM frameworks across various creativity metrics. The code is available at https://github.com/lawraa/LLM-Discussion.
Scalable Computation of Inter-Core Bounds Through Exact Abstractions
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2024
Year: 2024

Real-time systems (RTSs) are at the heart of numerous safety-critical applications. An RTS typically consists of a set of real-time tasks (the software) that execute on a multicore shared-memory platform (the hardware) following a scheduling policy. In an RTS, computing inter-core bounds, i.e., bounds separating events produced by tasks on different cores, is crucial. While efficient techniques to over-approximate such bounds exist, little has been proposed to compute their exact values. Given an RTS with a set of cores C and a set of tasks T , under partitioned fixed-priority scheduling with limited preemption, a recent work by Foughali, Hladik and Zuepke (FHZ) models tasks with affinity c (i.e., allocated to core c in C) as a Uppaal timed automata (TA) network Nc. For each core c in C, Nc integrates blocking (due to data sharing) using tight analytical formulae. Through compositional model checking, FHZ achieved a substantial gain in scalability for bounds local to a core. However, computing inter-core bounds for some events of interest E, produced by a subset of tasks TE with different affinities CE, requires model checking the parallel composition of all TA networks Nc for each c in CE, which produces a large, often intractable, state space. In this paper, we present a new scalable approach based on exact abstractions to compute exact inter-core bounds in a schedulable RTS, under the assumption that tasks in TE have distinct affinities. We develop a novel algorithm, leveraging a new query that we implement in Uppaal, that computes for each TA network Nc in NE an abstraction A(Nc) preserving the exact intervals within which events occur on c, therefore drastically reducing the state space. The scalability of our approach is demonstrated on the WATERS 2017 industrial challenge, for which we efficiently compute various types of inter-core bounds where FHZ fails to scale.